


Five Times

by pylades



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: F/M, Tumblr: imagineyourotp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 18:51:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3661209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pylades/pseuds/pylades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five different times Jack and Katherine have touched ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times

**Author's Note:**

  * For [writetheniteaway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/writetheniteaway/gifts).



> Yeah, another imagineyourotp thing. Apologies for the utter cheese of it all.

**The First:**

Katherine’s reporter mind is still watching everything, considering the story, the headline (The army of Davids rejoice as Goliath slain?), but oh she’s tired.

She leans against a wagon, smiling dreamily as the boys hug and congratulate each other, lining up for a new day of work.

The past few days have been so wild and her emotions have gone from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. Her chance to write something real - front page news, at that. Humiliated in her father’s office. The look of betrayal in Jack’s eyes when he learned who she was. The kiss on the roof. Teddy Roosevelt! Her father’s humiliation, defeated by mere boys. Almost losing Jack to his dream of Santa Fe.

And then … not losing Jack. The promise of tomorrow - a meeting with her editor, this new and wonderful family that she’s made, and Jack. Certainly Jack.

As if he knows she’s thinking of him, he approaches and leans into Katherine. It’s scandalous and her father is still watching them, but she doesn’t care.

Still, Jack doesn’t kiss her. He just leans in and rests his forehead against hers.

“Did’ya hear the headline, Ace?”

“No,” she says softly, closing her eyes. “We’re still too busy writing it.”

**The Second:**

Sometimes Jack thinks that Joe only offered him a job drawin’ for the World as another way to humiliate him.

He doesn’t fit in … not inside, in these offices. Not where everyone knows who he is (Jack Kelly, newsboy, strike leader). He can’t stand the suit that he’s expected to wear when he meets with his editor to turn in his sketches.

The starched sleeves, the tie, both strangle him. So does the feeling that they’re all judging him. Jack Kelly, newsboy, strike leader, courtin’ the boss’ daughter. He doesn’t fit here.

On the street, though, these men don’t matter to him. He doesn’t acknowledge their snooty-high-falutin’ ways because he’s Jack Kelly. Newsboy. Strike leader. He defeated Joe Pulitzer and could do it again, one hand tied behind his back.

But the job is a good one, the money is good, and he can draw. He can effect change with ink and newsprint.

And when he feels like he’s crawling the walls and he wants to run away to Santa Fe, he sees Katherine. And she’ll move into his arms, fitting her soft curves against him, pressin’ her forehead to his, her small hands moving through his hair comfortingly.

And that’s all the fitting that matters to him.

**The Third:**

Fever strikes New York late in the summer of ‘01 and it leaves no class untouched.

It spreads like quick fire throughout New York’s working class. A few of the newsboys catch it and quarantine wards also spread throughout the city as boys are unceremoniously evicted from their lodging houses. Word comes from Brooklyn that even the mighty Spot Conlon spent a long week in a ward run by the Sisters of Mercy. Spot rallies, though, and makes it through.

It moves, too, through the upper class. Though her own family is safely out of the city, there are still losses that Katherine feels keenly. A story in the World tells her that the steel heiress engaged to marry Bill Hearst in the autumn has died.

Katherine was fifteen when typhoid almost took her life, when it did take her sister from her. That was before the Sun, before the Strike, and before Jack Kelly.

Jack, too, seems overwhelmed by the news of the fever. He and David have been working late into the night to protect the interests of the union members. Illness means time not spent working … no wages, no homes, and no food. She is watching him like a hawk for any signs of fever, but Jack is as healthy as ever. The dark smudges under his eyes are from exhaustion, not illness. He’s weary, but her husband is healthy.

She knows, too, that Jack watches her the same way. He’s always been a protector, but Jack’s even worse now. If he had his way, Katherine would not leave the safety of their apartment. They have their own very personal interest to protect, after all. He rests just under Katherine’s heart and spends most of the night twisting and turning, preventing her from sleeping restfully. 

If locking herself in the apartment were an assurance of his safety, she would do it. She would lock him in with her, for that matter.

Katherine knows better. After all, she’s been sick before. The best doctors from different hospitals and institutions around the United States (even one poor man brought on a steamer from England) hadn’t been able to help her.

Although she isn’t strongly attached to the religion of either of her parents, Katherine finds herself praying at night.

She prays for Jack’s continued health and her own.

She prays that their friends survive.

When she hears Jack start awake with a cough, she squeezes her eyes shut and prays.

She’s not a believer and yet she knows that Someone has heard when he reaches over to touch her shoulder, as if sensing her anxiousness, and whispers: “Ace, my throat was dry. Stop yer worryin’.”

Katherine rolls over, onto her side, and stares at him. Even as he’s drifting back to sleep, Jack’s hand curls over her hip, tugging her closer. She takes a deep breath, rests her forehead against his, and joins her husband in slumber.

**The Fourth:**

From the day they first met …

… Well, maybe not that first day. She thought he was an ass (“…skirt-chasing, cocky little son of a gun…” were her actual words) and he wasn’t sure he’d ever see the spunky girl from the street again, though he’d hoped …

… Anyway, from the start, from their real start, they’d stood together. Fights with her father, with anti-unionists, with editors and slumlords, it was Jack and Katherine. Never just Jack or only Katherine. (They had other allies, plenty of ‘em, but Jack and Katherine. That never changed.)

He wasn’t about to let her do this alone, society’s rules and manners and the glares of a stoic Irish midwife be damned. It was Jack and Katherine.

“You’ve never looked more beautiful, Ace.”

“Stuff it, Kelly,” she said, though her words were punctuated by breathless pants and the occasional groan. “Ooh … I could throw my typewriter … at … YOU!”

“You love me too much,” he teased, stroking sweat-dampened hair from her forehead.

“Not … righ … OOOH .. NOW.”

“Okay, then, you love that beast of a machine too much.” Jack squeezed her hand as a reminder that he was there to squeeze as hard as she needed.

That made her smile, even as another pained screech left her and the midwife reappeared.

It hurt him to see her in such pain, but he wasn’t leaving her side.

And he didn’t. When it was over and the midwife had left them with their son — their son! — in his mother’s arms, Jack leaned in and rested his forehead gently against hers.

“You did it, Ace.”

“We did it, Jack.”

**The Fifth:**

Although she’s surrounded by other women and their families, Katherine feels more alone than she has since the day he left.

Men are marching down the gangplank, solemn and proud, but she watches those solemn expressions dissolve when they recognize wives … lovers … children … and parents.

Someone else will write the story of the brave young men returning from trenches and battlefields across Europe. She’s written a few of those stories herself over the past year, but not today. Today, she’s one of those wives, anxiously waiting in the crowd. All she cares about is watching her man walk down that shaky gangplank and into her arms.

She knows he’s on that ship. Letters take forever to cross the ocean (it was so difficult to be strong when a letter sent in September doesn’t receive a reply until February, fearful wives told her), but the Kellys are lucky. Reporters are a loyal brotherhood and they’ve forged strong friendships. Jack’s sketches from the trenches have made it home to Katherine (and to the World) because of those friendships. And a cable, straight from the Sun’s reporter in London, telling her that Jack’s climbed aboard the American freighter home.

Home to her.

She hasn’t seen him in a year (some women have told her about their husbands coming home, so different – frail and haunted and unfamiliar), but Katherine’s eye catches sight of her husband and he’s as familiar as ever. She recognizes that untamed sandy brown hair, his easy amble down the plank and without hesitation runs to him. If this war has changed him (how could it not have?), she doesn’t see it in that moment.

He catches her in his arms, holding her tight. They don’t kiss, although she aches to feel his smiling lips against her own again, but Katherine leans her forehead against his. Her hand slips behind his head, fingers tangling in those familiar locks. And she just holds him.

There will be time for more later, but all she needs now is to feel him, to breathe with him.

He’s come home. To her.


End file.
